Enterprise content marketing is easy; creating and publishing content is relatively fuss-free with the variety of online platforms and tools available to the marketer today.
One can start developing content by writing on trending topics, or the company’s accomplishments, or even mention day to day activities and updates. But the real question is: how effective is your content and how persuasive is it?
As we suggested earlier, today we have a number of channels, platforms, and tools to reach the end customer – the data consumer, directly. Utilising analytics, artificial intelligence, and programmatic advertising, today’s marketer is better equipped for one to one (1-1) conversations with and targeting of the customer.
However, when measured in the cold light of day, many marketers recognize grudgingly that their marketing investments have not been effective and delivering value in acquiring, retaining and growing the customer value.
Resources, effort, and budgets must be cost-efficient and not wasted. To maximize your marketing spend and effort, it’s imperative to create a persona specifically curated for your own business and customers.
Personas are digital representations of your customers, stakeholders, and audience. By investing effort and resources into understanding your target audience and creating representative personas, the productivity in marketing efforts increases significantly according to qualitative studies.
Today with the benefit and advent of technology including AI, machine learning, analytics and social media listening, the marketer is able to profile and take into consideration who their customers/ audience really are; what they’d like to accomplish, what their goals are, and just how they behave whenever they are online or on your website.
With the tsunami of data that enterprises now collect (consciously or unconsciously), we can develop a broad picture of your customers. But narrowing it down to three to five (3-5) generic types would be beneficial in the immediate term.
These are the must-haves of your persona:
- Demographic information
- Job title, roles, and responsibilities
- Company industry and location
- Life outside work and household income
- Behavioral information
- What content do they consume
- What are their usual pain points
- What do they purchase
Why is developing persona important?
Personas save you time and money. They provide the insights that enable you to make intelligent decisions. Everything from what content to develop, what excites one persona from another to what effective channels, modes and platforms of marketing to utilize means that the marketer today can make agile, and bottom-line driven decisions to benefit the business.
By understanding one’s target audience also means that you are more in-tune and nimble to changing market trends and requirements.
For example, the deep understanding of the various segments of the voting public in 2008, 2012 and 2016, US Presidential elections enabled candidates to convince, react and influence their constituents across the 50 states.
Similarly, major retailers in the US including Macy’s, Walmart, and Target were able to react to peak periods, predict in advance interest levels and manage expectations through social listening and advertising during a difficult retail environment of 2017.
What does this mean for you then?
You now have the power to create curated content and communications for your “true” audience with reduced resources and time spent. This leads to efforts that actually bring in conversions.
Each persona should be curated with end audience and goals in mind. It’s crucial that you understand them individually. While building personas can be a time-consuming action, it will bring you loads of value in the long run.
Priority Consultants specializes in Public Relations, Content Marketing, Content Generation, and Marketing Communications and Events in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, and Hong Kong. To learn more about how we have helped numerous companies in Asia be more effective please connect with us here. We’d love to hear from you.